Microsoft’s Dope New Tool Is Like Autocomplete for Drawing

Creating even a few seconds of a hand-drawn animation—think old-school Looney Tunes, or earlier Disney films like Snow White—is a painstaking process that requires artists to draw hundreds, if not thousands, of frames. Over the years, advances in digital animation tools have streamlined that process and, in doing so, created a new aesthetic best seen in the faces of Pixar’s canon of characters.

Microsoft Research, along with the University of Hong Kong and the University of Tokyo, just unveiled a proof-of-concept technology that could bring back the charm of older, hand-drawn cartoons, with the speed and fluidity of today’s animation software. “Autocomplete hand-drawn animations” debuted at the Siggraph Asia conference, and it’s an interactive system that watches what the artist draws and then predicts what frame or line might come next. It can also smartly connect the dots between two different drawings, and propagate the motion that should occur between the two sketches. This works for color too: fill in the first frame with certain hues, and the system will replicate them.

If this tool makes it to market, it could be a boon to the designers who toil over animated movies. You’d certainly think it could help at Pixar, where designers take a research-intensive approach to making movies. And if Disney’s 2013 Oscar-winning animation Paperman is any indication, there’s a hunger for this kind of nostalgic hand-crafted look; the studio test-drove a brand new software called Meander for that short film, designed to blend the look and feel of older animation with elements of today’s 3-D computer-generated ones.

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Ideo Just Sold Part of Itself to Join a ‘Creative Collective’

Ideo, the big-name Silicon Valley design consultancy and propagator of “design thinking,” has sold part of its business and joined the Kyu collective. Kyu is part of Tokyo’s Hakuhodo DY Holdings, and includes other agencies like Sid Lee, Red Peak Group, and Digital Kitchen. The dollar value of the partial acquisition, and the fraction of Ideo’s business that it constitutes, have not been made public.

The rate of change has been dizzying, and today’s advanced technologies — AI, genomics, robotics, data science, the Internet of Things — have so outpaced our industrial-era organizations and infrastructure, they end up hitting institutional cul-de-sacs. The technologies don’t come to a halt, of course, they simply move on, seeking out other places where they race ahead. If our institutions are to survive, they’ll have to create new roadways.

That’s a design problem — one that requires new rules of engagement with a broad set of collaborators. We’re excited to have found those collaborators in a few like-minded design firms.

In the same post, Brown quickly dismisses the idea that Ideo is “caught in the much ballyhooed death spiral of the independent design firm.” Instead, he says the decision to sell a stake in Ideo’s business and join a collective is part of a larger mission to “apply our collective design practice to greater challenges.” Whatever the reason, the business deal fits the larger trend of big firms buying up smaller design studios. McKinsey bought Lunar; Yves Béhar sold a majority stake in fuseproject to the Chinese holding company BlueFocus. In many ways, these transitions aren’t new. There’s a long history of commingling between design and business (more on that here). Ideo is just the latest—and most high-profile—firm to make such a move.

Finland Just Designed the Most Finnish Emoji Ever

ThisisFINLAND / Bruno Leo Ribeiro

Finland, land of the midnight sun, saunas, black metal, and phones that were once cool, is now also the land of emoji. The Nordic country is the first in the world to release a set of government-approved emoji stickers.

Working with Nokia, Finland distilled its essence down to 30 emoji that it will roll out over the next month. You can get the first three—a naked couple in a sauna, a spiked-leather-wearing headbanger, and, of course, a Nokia phone now. They’re awesome, and pretty damn Finnish.

ThisisFINLAND / Bruno Leo Ribeiro

Finland says it’s the first country to do this, and, as a marketing scheme, it was only a matter of time before governments embraced emoji. Unlike a flag, which wraps its symbolism into an abstracted visuals, these emoji communicate national pride in the most literal way possible. And directly to our phones, no less.

You get the sense that Finland is having some fun with this. And indeed, according to Petra Theman, Director for Public Diplomacy at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, they’re meant to be tongue-in-cheek. “We have been anything but serious when creating these emojis. Hopefully they will open up not only our weirdness but also our strengths of which unarming honesty is one example,” he says.

Let’s hope other countries follow suit. I wouldn’t mind finding out what a disarmingly honest emoji might look like coming from the United States.

Rather than hire another professional designer to create the replacement logo for Kenjiro Sano’s deposed work—which was thrown out after Belgian designer Olivier Debie raised concerns over its similarity to his own work—the organizers have launched a public competition. Applicants must be at least 18 years old, and either a native of Japan or a foreign national with the right to live in Japan. No design experience is required. Themes to consider are:

“The power of sport”, “Typifying Tokyo and/or Japan”, “World peace”, “Exerting the utmost efforts and striving to achieve a personal best,”, “Inclusivity”, “Innovation and Futuristic”, “Regeneration (ability to recover from the 2011 disaster).”

It’s possible the Tokyo Organizing Committee is sick and tired of dealing with designers (besides the controversy over Sano’s logo, the Japanese government scrapped Zaha Hadid’s $2 billion stadium and started over from scratch), and decided to just throw its hands up and be done.

Or, more optimistically, perhaps the new submission criteria are meant to democratize the creation of a symbol that will celebrate people of all kinds. It’s worked before: the original American Airlines logo was designed by a traffic manager who entered the company’s open call for submissions.

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This is Apple’s newest spaceship. Or at least it will be, once the ink dries and construction begins. The new Sunnyvale campus, named Central & Wolfe for the streets that border it, is reportedly the latest in Apple’s big land grab and building craze. This campus is situated five miles from where Apple’s new main campus in Cupertino is being built. It’s designed, notably, not by original spaceship architects Foster + Partners but by the studio HOK, who designed Apple’s current offices at 1 Infinite Loop. There’s no news on when construction will begin or what the buildings will be used for, but we have the first renderings of the massive space (HOK didn’t respond to a request for comment).

Renderings of the plan show Apple transforming nine buildings from an old, ’70s-era office park into a single curving building that looks like a three-leaf clover. The six story, 770,000 square-foot building has nary a straight line in sight, save for the outline of the main courtyard that you can look out onto from Apple store-esque curved glass windows. The clover leaf sections also open onto individual courtyards with the hope, we presume, to bring the some 4,000 computer-obsessed employees who will be working in this building closer to nature. In total, the plan calls for 90,000 square-feet of accessible green space.

It appears that Apple is doubling down on its spaceship aesthetic. The company is so committed to its curvilinear form factor that there’s even a website celebrating the fact that the building isn’t a box. You can see this same aesthetic creeping across technology companies (see also: Google’s flexible, transparent canopied headquarters). These more organic shapes could be a way to imbue a warmth into an otherwise high tech environment. It’s been found that the human brain simply finds curves to be more aesthetically pleasing than hard, straight lines. There’s also the fact that, for the first time, we’re actually able to build these curving structures from glass, thanks to improved glass manufacturing technology. Whatever the reason, it’s probably safe to assume that we’re going to be seeing a lot more curving, sinewy architecture in the future.

Airbnb Just Bought a Bizarro Russian Gadget Company

Airbnb just bought Lapka. The apartment rental and travel company needs no introduction. Lapka, on the other hand, probably does: It’s a tiny Russian design studio that makes odd but beautiful sensor-centric gadgets, like this sleek smartphone-assisted breathalyzer, and wooden and ceramic blocks that capture environmental data like radiation and humidity. More recently, Lapka unveiled a set of concept sensor nodes created for Google’s modular Ara phone.

Clues about what this partnership might yield are scant. Airbnb says this acquisition has to do with bringing Lapka’s unique talents on board, and does not signal that Airbnb will be venturing into device manufacturing—in other words, don’t expect to start seeing Airbnb-branded breathalyzers in your next European flat rental. Joe Gebbia, co-founder and chief product officer, says via email: “Since the moment Lapka launched their first product,”—that’s the Personal Environment Monitor—“I have been inspired by their impressive design sensibilities—a combination of beauty, form, and story. These guys have tenacity and drive towards creating the future, and I’m thrilled to get to work alongside them at Airbnb to create a world where people can belong anywhere.”

Airbnb declined to comment further at this time—and is not disclosing the terms of the deal—but on Lapka’s blog, founder Vadik Marmeladov writes: “At Lapka, we were unconcerned with investing in a particular device, service, category or direction. Instead, we focused on creating an adaptable lifestyle brand where people can engage comfortably and enthusiastically…we never intended to build ‘medical devices,’ ” and, “what we’re capable of building together is beyond explanation, so let’s leave that for later news. The future is long.”

Without over-hypothesizing, it’s clear that Airbnb will be able to help Lapka realize its goal of delivering high-end industrial design to the masses, all while creating even more seamless travel experiences for its users.

Fortunately, new tools have been popping up that help designers clear things up. The most recent is 10,000ft Insights, desktop and tablet software from 10,000ft and design studio Artefact that helps teams organize and visualize their design process by gathering all those disparate pieces of information in one place.

10,000ft Insights is a little like Wake (another tool we recently wrote about), in that its aim is to make design decisions more transparent. Everyone involved in a project—designers, engineers, business team—should have a clear picture of what’s being developing and how they can contribute. The idea is that by streamlining the design process and tracking methodology early on, it will lead to more and better ideas and insights.

The software from 10,000ft lets you arrange all of your content, called Sparks, into Pinterest-like boards. These Sparks can be anything—image inspiration, sketches, prototypes—and you can add notes, links, and files to each one.

Artefact and 10,000ft also built a series of “design thinking” tools into the software, to help facilitate brainstorming and organization. You can sort your Sparks into various columns and categories, a matrix tool helps you SWOT those ideas, a voting tool gives you quantifiable feedback, and then the decision-making tool helps teams synthesize all of your findings.

It’s interesting to watch as “design thinking” becomes systemized and rolled out to all aspects of a company. We’ve heard a lot about the importance of design in business, and tools like 10,000ft and Wake are manifestations of that new focus.

Jony Ive’s First Apple Store Is Made of Insane Curved Glass

Customers wait for the opening of the first Apple store in Brussels, Belgium September 18, 2015. FRANCOIS LENOIR/Reuters/Corbis

Apple opens new stores all the time, but this one, which opened Saturday in Brussels, is special: It was designed by Sir Jony Ive himself.

We knew an Ive-ified store was coming. A profile published February in The New Yorker noted that Ive had “begun to work with [Angela] Ahrendts, Apple’s senior vice-president of retail, on a redesign—as yet unannounced—of the Apple Stores.” A few months later, news of Ive’s promotion to chief design officer indicated he would play a larger role in the design of Apple’s retail spaces.

What we didn’t know (but probably should have predicted) was that Ive’s first store would boast some of the most impressive work in glass manufacturing to date. The store walls are made of 26-feet tall, floor-to-ceiling glass panels, a few of which are even curved, to round out the building’s corners. Apple has been pushing the limits on what it can construct with glass for a while. In terms of engineering, this is a leap ahead of what the company did for its store in Hangzhou, China, where the 50-feet-high panels of glass already represented some serious sweat. It’s also a small hint of what’s to come at Apple’s new donut-shaped Cupertino headquarters, which will be made almost entirely of concave glass panels—the ultimate expression of these new manufacturing techniques.

This Music Video Is Made To Be Watched On Your Phone

Few things inspire so much ire in the smartphone generation as the vertically-shot video. It’s a sin against humanity! A creative gaffe! Totally unwatchable!

Or is it?

Electronic band Harrison just released a video for its new song, “How Can It Be,” that was purposefully made to be watched on your smartphone. More specifically, with your phone gripped vertically in your hand. Oh, and it’s pretty great.

The video, created by DTO Films, chronicles a text message thread between a young couple in the process of breaking up. It fills your phone’s screen and drops you in the middle of the action, your phone’s screen replaced with that of Katy, the young seductress who’s breaking her hapless boyfriend’s heart. As text messages volley back and forth, you voyeuristically follow along like a hacker who’s gained access to a fictional stranger’s phone.

It’s a simple but compelling concept designed specifically for those of us whose phones are permanently attached to our hands. It’s also just the most recent in a series of phone-first music videos that make the most of the small-screen format: check out Party’s brilliant video for Namie Amuro’s “Golden Touch” and Jono Brandel’s video for Kimbra’s “Carolina.” It just goes to show that the smartphone isn’t a creative restraint anymore—it’s a whole new canvas.

Look at This Insane Baby Stroller

Kim Hyeonseok

Baby strollers have evolved over time to look less like quaint prams and more like high-performance sporting equipment. One over-the-top model even has an LCD screen, headlights, and a built-in phone charger.

But even that specimen can’t compete with the Strollever, a new carriage design that looks like it would be more at home in a NASA lab than on a shelf at REI. This thing resembles a small rocketship, or even one of Google’s cute self-driving cars.

Specs are scant, but Strollever was designed by Kim Hyeonseok (who’s also designed a futuristic toilet) and its marquee feature is a gyroscope suspension system. Sensors on the wheels detect rocky terrain, and the stroller auto-adjusts its suspension so any roadbumps you might hit don’t upset the dozing tot within. Your baby will stay asleep, blissfully ignorant, while you’re stuck pushing a spaceship on wheels, explaining yourself to your neighbors.

The baby windshield is made of UV-resistant glass and provides additional protection against the elements. The stroller also has forward-facing headlamps and additional storage in the base. No details yet on when or where the Jetson-ian Strollever will be available.

This Twitter Bot Turns Your Pictures Into Pixelated Glitch Art

The picture above depicts a sunset in Montauk, New York, though you can’t really tell. The reason? I ran it through @pixelsorter, a Twitter bot that uses Ruby programming language to convert images into abstracted, glitchy visuals.

Think of @pixelsorter like Instagram filters on steroids. To make an otherwise mundane photo less boring, you choose from a handful of presets—“drip,” “audio,” “burst”—that dictate how the pixels will re-sort. Tweet an image and mention @pixelsorter, and the bot will spit back a freshly distorted photo. You can also include your desired presets in brackets (as in, “@pixelsorter preset[drip]”). Get bored with that, and you can start to customize presets by asking the service to sort pixels according to parameters like green, saturation, brightness, opacity, and so on. @pixelsorter always tweets back a simple “hi,” and the inevitably trippy result.

New Apple Campus Will Have an Observation Deck for Visitors

City of Cupertino

Visitors to Apple’s new Cupertino campus will get a ringside view of the action. According to plans the company filed with the City of Cupertino, the mostly glass visitor’s center will include a rooftop observation deck, where Apple fans making the Cupertino pilgrimage can gaze upon the rest of Norman Foster’s design.

The last time we got a good look at the plans for Apple’s new spaceship-esque headquarters in Cupertino, we saw one rendering that hinted at a design for a visitor’s center, but details were scant.

Now we have more intel: The center will include a 2,300-square-foot café and a 10,000-square-foot retail space, Cupertino’s first Apple store. According to an aerial shot of construction, it sits a few blocks southeast of the looping building. Apple has not yet responded to our request for comment.

The 2.8-million-square-foot donut-shaped Apple Campus 2 will be one of the most futuristically engineered buildings in the world, with floor-to-ceiling concave glass walls and a park designed by Apple’s own arborist. But until the campus and its visitor center open, we’ll have to be satisfied with surreptitious drone footage.

Tokyo’s Uninspired Olympics Logo Might Be a Design Ripoff

We didn’t care for Tokyo’s Olympics logo when it was unveiled earlier this week. Now, it appears that the design has a bigger problem than just uninspired design; it bears a striking similarity to another logo.

Designed by Kenjiro Sano, the 2020 Olympics logo features a rectangular pillar, with two triangles on its top and bottom. So does Studio Debie’s emblem for the Belgian Théâtre de Liège. There are differences: Debie’s version has white shapes set in a black circle, while Sano’s has gold, silver, and black forms as well as a rising red “sun.”

Studio Debie’s founder, Olivier Debie, strongly suggested in a tweet that Sano ripped off his 2011 design. Sano, in a statement issued by the Tokyo 2020 Organizing Committee, said, “I have no particular comment to make.”

Accusations of plagiarism are common in the graphic design world. When Airbnb rebranded last year, introducing the little Bélo icon, it didn’t take long for armchair design critics to accuse the company of lifting the logo from not one but two other companies’ branding identities. And there’s a site, called Logo Thief, devoted to documenting such occurrences.

This is one of the perils of drawing simple lines and shapes. Certain combinations of geometric forms will inevitably look like others, making it more difficult to cast blame than some designers might like. But it also pays to do some research to make sure your design doesn’t closely resemble one that’s already out there.

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Hasami, Japan, is the pottery town. Artisans in the southern Nagasaki prefecture have manufactured porcelain and china for more than 400 years. As the years and pieces of pottery pile up, so do the imperfect teacups, bowls, and vases that can’t be sold.

Maruhiro, a shop in the Naga prefecture that sells stunning ceramics, landed on an ingenious solution for that would-be waste: turn them into a floor. When the brand’s flagship store underwent a recent renovation, designer Yusuke Seki built an elevated floor entirely out of tableware. There are 25,000 pieces of crockery total, grouted with concrete to make for a rock-solid foundation.

Maruhiro isn’t the first business to recycle unwanted goods. Levi’s, for instance, uses worn-out jeans as insulation in place of fiberglass. Starbucks wove old bicycle tubes and Delft blue tiles into the interiors of its high-concept store in Amsterdam. But Maruhiro goes beyond recycling materials to showcase the beauty of flawed craftsmanship.

LaGuardia Airport Is Getting Torn Down for a $4B Redesign

Office Of The Governor Andrew Cuomo

New York’s LaGuardia Airport, long derided for its shoddy terminals and chronic travel delays, will be torn down and rebuilt. New York Governor Andrew M. Cuomo says the new, modern airport will rival the world’s best airports when it’s up and running in 2021.

Cuomo unveiled plans for the new La Guardia at a luncheon in New York on Monday, along with Vice President Joe Biden. The renderings, presented by real estate developer Daniel R. Tishman, show a single terminal that will replace the four existing disjointed terminals built in the mid-20th century. The new terminal will be set 600 feet closer to Grand Central Parkway highway, freeing up two miles of space for planes to taxi in and take off. The plan also includes a rail link connecting LaGuardia to the subway system (which JFK Airport already has), as well as a ferry service. The project is expected to cost $4 billion, with additional (but undisclosed) funding from Delta Airlines, which has a hub at LaGuardia.

Cuomo’s announcement doesn’t explicitly address whether the existing La Guardia will need to shut down during construction, but the development will happen in two phases, starting in 2016. LaGuardia Gateway, a partnership between the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, will tackle the redevelopment of Terminals A and B, hopefully by 2019. After that, Delta will handle construction on Terminals C and D.

The announcement has been a long time coming. Cuomo first advocated for a new LaGuardia last year, after a chorus of media criticism—including a Travel + Leisure story that ranked LaGuardia the worst airport in the United States—led to the formation of the Global Gateway Alliance, a group advocating for airport improvements. Efforts stalled again and again, but Cuomo said yesterday that this newest announcement signals a concrete start to redevelopment. “Best of all, it’s not a plan, it’s not a sketch, it’s not a dream, it’s not a vision,” he said. “It is actually happening.”

Tokyo’s Olympics Logo Is a Confusing Geometric Mess

Tokyo has a logo for its 2020 Olympic games, and what a confusing one it is.

The flat symbol, unveiled by the Tokyo 2020 Organizing Committee, comprises four geometric shapes—a red circle, a black rectangle, and gold and silver triangles, each with a concave hypotenuse—forming a “T,” and “L,” and an “r.” We can assume that “T” stands for Tokyo, and that the red circle is a reference to Japan’s rising sun, also pictured on the country’s flag. The significance and symbolism behind the rest of the imagery prove baffling.

The insignia is by Kenjiro Sano, whose design résumé includes local packaging and product designs, and it’s radically different from the frenetic, zany, and script-like logos we’ve seen for recent Olympic games in Rio de Janeiro, London, and Beijing. Instead, Sano’s buttoned-up logo is a throwback to logos from the 1960s and 1970s, like the simple gold-and-red icon for the Tokyo games in 1964, and the rising sun and snowflake combo used for the Sapporo games in 1972.

Japanese designers are renowned for elegant, efficient, minimalism. Consider Muji’s restrained approach to homewares, Uniqlo’s consistently pared down fashions, and the simple ingenuity of Shigeru Ban’s architecture. Unlike Japan’s other design exports, Sano’s logo for Tokyo is less but not more.

Google Could Make Glasses That Take Searchable Video

Unites States Patent and Trademark Office

Google filed a patent today for a Glass-like wearable that records video and makes it searchable. If the gadget senses, through pre-programmed cues, that a significant moment is taking place, it will document the event and file the clip to the cloud for your future reference.

The patent doesn’t state that this new functionality is for Google Glass, but it does shows the processor and data storage mounted onto a Harry Potter–esque pair of spectacles. It could be a hint that Google is either reprising the troubled Glass’s potential as a consumer product or considering a separate tool geared toward Glass’ devotees in the medical and technical industries.

In a hypothetical scenario, Google imagines the glass being used by security personnel or airport screeners to review “the faces of all people that were seen between 1 P.M. and 3 P.M.” For the rest of us, it could be a neat lifelogging device—a means for capturing events accurately without removing yourself from the action. (You’d no longer have to fish out your smartphone, set up the composition, and press the record button.) But that has its drawbacks, too. Some people may not take kindly to being recorded without their explicit permission. Google Glass had a creepy-vibe problem, and these glasses, however school-marme looking, might not be an exception.

Japan Axes a Giant, $2B Olympic Stadium

Zaha Hadid Architects

Zaha Hadid’s controversial design for Japan’s 2020 Olympics is history. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe pointed to the swelling cost—over $2 billion—as the reason his government would “start over from zero.”

Hadid has been under fire for her sprawling, bike-helmet-shaped stadium since 2013, when a group of Japanese architects and designers protested the proposal, saying that, at 3 million square feet, the 80,000-seater was “too big” for its surroundings. Acclaimed architect Toyo Ito and Pritzker Prize-winning Fumihiko Maki launched an online petition, imploring the government to stop construction. They have now fished their wish.

Hadid’s responses to all this criticism have been varied. In 2014, in a rare show of acquiescence, the architect modified the plans to include lighter and more cost-effective materials but not necessarily to downsize the structure. At the time, the Japan Sports Council had already sliced the budget for the stadium in half, from 300 billion yen (about $2.4 billion) to 169 billion yen (about $1.3 billion). Later in the year, Hadid slammed the Japanese architects protesting the stadium, suggesting that they were both sore losers and xenophobic in their stance against an Iraqi-British architect building in Japan.

The final nail in the coffin is unclear, but in a statement, Hadid’s firm denied that rising costs were to blame.

The stadium cancellation is one in a long string of controversies that have recently plagued the Pritzer Prize–winning architect. She deflected any responsibility over the deaths of migrant workers connected to the World Cup construction site. Her selection as the architect for the $1 billion Iraq parliament building was shady. And just earlier this year, after five months of legal battle, Hadid settled on a libel case against the New York Review of Books and its critic Martin Filler.

Coca-Cola’s Beautiful New Logo Is No Logo at All

FP7/DXB

Coca-Cola has erased its famous script from its new cans. Gone, poof, vanished, leaving behind a naked white ribbon, fluttering against Coke’s theater-curtain-red backdrop.

FP7/DXB, McCann-Erickson’s agency branch in Dubai, rolled out a limited-edition run of the new package design in Middle Eastern countries for the month of Ramadan, as part of Coca-Cola’s umbrella campaign to fight prejudice, “Let’s take an extra second.” The message behind the stripped down cans: don’t label other people.

Kumbaya rhetoric aside, the new cans say a lot about today’s branding landscape, without saying anything at all. Corporate logos are evolving to become simpler and flatter, and doing it faster. Consider Twitter: the site once used a fully fledged cartoon as its mascot. Today, it’s a flat white bird with very little plumage. Facebook, too, just unveiled a vanilla update to its logomark. Coca-Cola’s enduring look can go simpler without sacrificing design identity; that ribbon is enough to let us know what’s in store.